+WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR? 15TH Sunday C, 2025
Loving God with all our hearts, with all our beings, all our strength and all our minds, and our neighbor as ourselves is what the whole of Christian or monastic lives are committed to each day.
Doing this is what gives our lives their deepest meaning, gives us a sense of fulfillment like nothing else in our lives. To fail to do so is to feel empty, to have lives without lasting purpose. We are made in God’s very own image and likeness and when we truly love God and our neighbor, all the broken parts of our lives come together and are healed. In doing so we come to know already what eternal life is like, are given a foretaste of it.
It is one thing to know this intellectually but another to actually experience it and to let our lives become vehicles of grace for all those around us. This can only happen if we experience the depth of God’s love at the very core of our beings, if we know from experience what Christ has done in dying on a cross.
St Paul is trying to bring this home to us in his letter to the Colossians that we just heard. In Christ all things in heaven and on earth were created, all things visible and invisible. Jesus is the very head of the Church, reconciling all things in himself through the blood of the cross. This reconciliation is especially important for our Church today where various forces are often the cause of conflict and division.
It is only in the experience of this great love God has for us that mutual understanding and appreciation can take place. And this is all the more crucial in a world today that is often fragmented by social and political forces that have become oppressive. When the scholar of the Law asks Jesus “Who is my neighbor” we have a clear example of this divisiveness, one social stance over against another and he does so in order to justify himself.
I found myself asking what this means, the scholar of the Law wanting to justify himself. It seems he had his own ideas about who is worthy of God’s love and who is not, who deserves kind treatment and who does not. Jesus then tells us of someone who fell victim of robbers, who was stripped, beaten and left half dead. And then of all people, a Samaritan who was thought alienated from the Law, is the one who shows this poor man compassion and the love.
Who are the victims of our own society, the persons mistreated and abused? This is certainly a challenge for us, especially when we are looking at what is happening to migrants, refugees and millions of poor in all parts of our world. It is all too easy to be like the priest who passed by on the other side of the road, or to be like the Levite who ignored this person’s condition.
And if we delve into who Jesus is talking about even further, we may find that this wounded, stripped and broken person may not be very far at all, from our own daily experience. If we dare to be sensitive to the needs of others, we may quickly find they are often enough the very persons we live with, whether in our own family or monastic community. Isn’t this what the author of Deuteronomy is getting when he tells us that “this command that I enjoin on you today is not too mysterious and remote for you,. It is something very near to you, already in your mouths and your hearts; you have only to carry it out.”
The Eucharist we are about to celebrate makes present what took place on Calvary two thousand years ago, so that Christ’s love may fill our hearts. This sacrifice is taking place all over the world every day. The great act of love is to empower each one of our lives to be good Samaritans wherever we may be living and amid whatever we may be doing. May we share this great love with each and all of our brothers and sisters every day of our lives.
Deut. 30:10-14; Col. 1:15-20; Luke 10:25-37